Semiconductor component manufacturers are constantly striving to increase the speeds of their components. Because a semiconductor component, such as a microprocessor, contains up to a billion transistors or devices, the focus for increasing speed has been at the transistor level. One technique for improving performance has been to identify the critical circuit elements on a semiconductor chip and enhance the processing steps for their manufacture. For example, in circuit elements such as Insulated Gate Field Effect Transistors (IGFETs), semiconductor component manufacturers have engineered the drain sides and source sides of the IGFETs to lower the capacitance and resistance associated with these regions. In addition, they have improved the performance of IGFETs by engineering their channel regions. However, enhancing the performance of these transistors has degraded the performance of other transistors in the semiconductor chip. Thus, semiconductor component manufacturers sacrifice the performance of some of the circuit elements in a semiconductor chip while enhancing the performance of other circuit elements in the semiconductor chip to achieve an overall performance improvement.
Accordingly, what is needed is a semiconductor component and a method for manufacturing the semiconductor component that permits optimizing more of the circuit elements in a semiconductor chip.